On literacy, language and school

Abstracts

Neste artigo, propomos uma reflexão sobre as contribuições da filosofia da linguagem do Círculo de Bakhtin para a abordagem do conceito de letramentos na escola de educação básica. O projeto teórico do Círculo, que persegue a superação do dualismo entre vida e teoria, buscando compreender o vivido como evento, permite pensar as esferas da vida humana como instâncias nas quais se produzem enunciados em que os sujeitos assumem uma posição, uma atitude responsável em relação à vida. O fenômeno do letramento deve ser compreendido, para além da posse de novas tecnologias do ler e escrever, como a assunção pelos sujeitos de um posicionamento frente ao mundo. Essa perspectiva traz implicações para a abordagem dos letramentos, necessitando considerar, nas práticas pedagógicas, as relações de alteridade que se estabelecem entre alunos e professores e como, nessas relações, alteram-se os sujeitos e suas perspectivas sobre o que represente ler e escrever na contemporaneidade.

Linguagem; Interação; Responsividade; Letramento; Gêneros do discurso

ARTIGOS

On literacy, language and school

Hilda A. L. S. Micarello^I; Tânia Guedes Magalhães^II

^IUniversidade Federal de Juiz de Fora – UFJF, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil; [e-mail]

^IIUniversidade Federal de Juiz de Fora – UFJF, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil; [e-mail]

ABSTRACT

We propose a debate on the contributions of the Bakhtin Circle's philosophy of language in order to approach the concept of literacies at basic education schools. The Circle's theoretical project (which seeks to overcome the dualism between life and theory by understanding experiences as events) allows us to assume the spheres of human life as instantiations in which utterances – in which subjects assume a position, a responsible attitude towards life – are produced. The phenomenon of literacy must be understood as the assumption of an attitude before the world, going beyond new writing and reading technologies. This perspective carries implications in regards to the literacies approach. So, it is important to consider alterity relationships established between students and teachers in the pedagogical practices and how the subjects and their perspectives about what reading and writing contemporarily represent are altered.

Keywords: Language; Interaction; Responsiveness; Literacy; Speech Genres

Introduction

The current paper results from researches developed by research groups under our coordination and from reflections made within the scope of a subject taught in the Graduate Program in Education. Therefore, we would first like to thank our interlocutors, in both spheres of our academic achievements, for the contributions they brought to the construction of the current text through the dialogue on the topics approached here.

In our research and teaching activities, we have sought to understand the practices of reading and writing by teachers, children and young people according to the meanings that these individuals give to such practices. To do so, we take under consideration their experiences and the way they address the world, responding to it. This is because we believe in the need to address the school, as instantiation of literacy, in its ideological, thus social and cultural dimensions.

In this attempt of understanding, we find, in the philosophy of language by Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle, elements that have based our approach on the school practices of reading and writing, especially with respect to the relationships among the subjects who experience such practices and their peculiar insertion in the social contexts in which these practices are held. We sought to understand the phenomenon of literacies

To this end, we first present some notes on the philosophy of language according to Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle, and on how it allows addressing the topic of literacies in a perspective of integration between life and culture.

Next, we offer some considerations about the relationships between language and school, anchored in the view that reading and writing practices in the school context are an integral part of the individuals' lives. Therefore, they must be understood as a kind of response that individuals give to their insertion in the world. Finally, we make a few observations about the implications of this analytical perspective to the pedagogical practices and to the research on language and education.

1 The Bakhtin Circle's Philosophy of Language

The concept of speech genres presented by Bakhtin in his Speech genres & other late essays has become the cornerstone of theories about the genres and, consequently, about the literacies and their approaches in school practices. In the chapter entitled The problem of speech genres of the abovementioned work, Bakhtin introduces his definition of speech genres: "Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of utterances. These we may call speech genres" (1986, p.60; emphasis in original).

In general, teaching practices that put into perspective the formation of individuals able of moving with competence across different fields of written language use – therefore, literate - have emphasized the analysis of the characteristics of these relatively stable types of utterances - speech genres characteristics - at the expense of a more consistent approach to the conditions of its production, i.e., the fields of language use from which such utterances originate and the correlation of forces from which these fields are constituted of. Thus, the work with the Portuguese language oriented to a perspective of literacy and with focus on speech genres have often been restricted to a study of the properties of different genres. Such perspective adds little to that which prevailed in teaching practices focused on grammar rules since, such as those, it does not put into perspective the vitality of the language and its speakers. We understand that overcoming the reductionism of such approach requires reflecting on the philosophical system in which the notion of speech genres is architected by Bakhtin, which allows going beyond the linguistic content it entails and embracing its experiential dimension.

Reflecting further on the speech genres, the author says: "After all, language enters life through concrete utterances (which manifest language); and life enters language through concrete utterances as well" (BAKHTIN, 1986, p.63).

Faraco (2009) points out two major theoretical projects that permeate the Bakhtin Circle's production: the effort to overcome the "objectifications of the experienced historicity" (p.16),

By analyzing the relationships between the world of theory - or abstraction, to which Bakhtin also refers to as the cultural world - and the world of life, the author states that:

An act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two-faced Janus. It looks in two opposite directions: it looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life. But there is no unitary and unique plane where both faces would mutually determine each other in relation to a single unique unity. It is only the once-occurrent event of Being in the process of actualization that can constitute this unique unity; all that which is theoretical or aesthetic must be determined as a constituent moment in the once-occurrent event of Being, although no longer, of course, in theoretical or aesthetic terms (1993, p.2).

According to the philosopher, it is in the once-occurring event of human existence that one can seek to overcome the duality between theory and life. As a singular, unique and unrepeatable event, human existence should be the starting point for the construction of a philosophy able to overcome the dualisms resulting from the separation between theory and life, between objectiveness and subjectiveness. It is with the concreteness of his/her existence that the individual responds to the world, taking a position before it.

A consequence of the recognition by the individual of his/her existence as a unique and unrepeatable event is the fact that such "existing" cannot be indifferent. "When the subject perceives him/herself as unique (within his/her own existence and not as theoretical thought), he/she cannot stay indifferent to his/her uniqueness; he/she is compelled to position him/herself, to respond to it [...]" (FARACO, 2009, p.21).

Teachers' and students' perspectives about such experiences may, however, be quite different, because the world is not the same to all individuals. They perceive it and make sense of it from different value systems that come from the different places they occupy in this world. These differences in perspective are constitutive of the individuals' acts, "including our utterances" (FARACO, 2009, p21.),

As partner of the "I," the "other" is the one to whom I reply with my own acts, including the language practices in which I am involved. In the different fields of human activity, utterances are produced from the interactions among individuals, in which values of conflicting orientations, which are often contradictory, encounter and clash. The school, as one of those fields of human activity in which language is a central element, is also a place for encounters and clashes of values and perspectives that guide the individual's actions. Thus, we can think that the experience by teachers, children and young people with reading and writing in school, if on the one hand is characterized by encounters, because "language arises from man's need to express himself, to objectify himself" (BAKHTIN, 1986, p.67),

The excess of my seeing in relation to another human being provides the foundation for a certain sphere of my own exclusive self-activity, i.e., all those inner and outer actions which only I can perform in relation to the other, and which are completely inaccessible to the other himself from his own place outside of me; all those actions, that is, which render the other complete precisely in those respects in which he cannot complete himself by himself (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.24).

It follows from this perspective that the school, which is time-space for language-mediated encounters of individuals, can consist of a time-space for the reconnection between theory and life, between objectivity and subjectivity. The next section brings some elements that allow us to reflect on this possibility in the light of the concept of literacy.

2 Language, School and Life

According to Vološinov (1973),

What consequences do such statements bring to school? To answer this question, we go back to some widely discussed concepts, which are always required for a careful reflection on pedagogical processes: literacy and its relationship with school.

Literacy can be defined as a "set of social practices that use writing, as symbolic system and as technology, in specific contexts for specific purposes" (SCRIBNER; COLE, 1981 cited by KLEIMAN, 1995, p.19).

Writing has great importance in modern societies, especially because it excludes those who do not master it. Hence, Soares states that

socially and culturally, the literate individual is no longer the same person he/she was when illiterate, he/she begins to live in another social and cultural condition - it is not exactly about changing level or social and cultural class, but changing his/her social place, his/her way of living in society, his/her insertion in the culture – his/her relationship with others, with the context and with cultural assets becomes different. (1998, p.37)

The access to knowledge and the material and cultural assets of different discursive instances such as the legal, cultural, scientific, journalistic and literary ones, for example, happens through the mastery of reading and writing and their use. The literate person is able to consume and live with these assets. In contrast, the illiterate or functionally illiterate individual, regardless his/her education, stays on the sidelines of those instances, being isolated from knowledge, policy decisions, culture and from an effective social participation. Thus, it consolidates the status of dominant groups who hold power over the dominated ones, who do not master writing and its social uses, obviously not excluding the socioeconomic factors from such relationship.

With regards to the relation between alfabetismo

alfabetismo has an individual focus, which is rather dictated by the valued school competences and skills (cognitive and linguistic ones) of reading and writing (school and academic literacy), under a psychological perspective. Literacy embraces language social practices that involve writing in one way or another, whether they are valued or not valued, local or global, covering different contexts (family, church, work, media, school, etc) in a sociological, anthropological and socio-cultural perspective (ROJO, 2009, p.98)

To corroborate our adoption to this perspective of literacy in a social approach, we resort to Street (1984) when he proposes not literacy, in the singular, but "literacies," considering that there is a multiplicity of literacies, which refer to the varied cultural practices in different fields, and not only to writing itself, including, in such practices, power relations. The author states that it is necessary to talk about "literacy practices,"

In this sense, the author proposed the division of literacy into two models: the autonomous and the ideological one. The autonomous model characterized literacy in "technical terms, treating it as independent of social context, an autonomous variable whose consequences to society and cognition derive from its intrinsic nature" (STREET, 1993 apud ROJO, 2009, p.99).

However, the school usually obliterates the individual's language, because it is centered, most of the time, on autonomous literacy: the varieties of students are not taken under consideration, and proposals of reading and writing are little related to the students' lives (GERALDI, 1984). Such proposals are not restricted only to the Portuguese Language school subject, but they involve all subjects using language in order to implement the learning process. According to Kleiman (2007), in school, reading and writing are thought as a set of abilities, as if the students, over the years, were progressively and cumulatively acquiring them until they reached an "ideal." However, the author shows that studies on literacy emphasize the perspective that reading and writing are discursive practices, with "multiple functions and inseparable from the contexts in which they are developed" (KLEIMAN, 2007, p.4).

As a proposal to this challenge, we understand that literacy practices that involve reading, writing and orality in the school everyday actions require motivation: it is not possible to think school language practices without taking into account the individuals, the interlocutors. It would be interesting, therefore, to bring the dialogue situations of everyday life into the classroom, always basing it on the Bakhtinian propositions that language is not produced by a single individual. Doing so means questioning how the lives of children and young people, especially those from the lower classes, are taken into consideration when we propose to insert them in new literacy practices. From this central questioning, we can propose other questions: what are the meanings they produce for the experience of reading and writing and how do they respond to them? Do these activities engage and interest them? What kind of involvement and commitment do these children and young people create with these experiences and what does it say? By being in contact with the living language, with significant practices for the appropriation of its forms, the individual certainly learns his/her language and develops him/herself in it.

Therefore, we resort to a theoretician that, back in 1991, made striking proposals for writing: Geraldi argued that the school should carry out "projects to produce texts addressed to real or possible interlocutors" (1991, p.162).

In the 80s and 90s, studies on the consequences of using speech genres in school were still at the beginning. In current days, we understand that literacy practices, in the term's broad and social sense, involve speech genres that are linguistic forms recognized by the individuals in its different social uses and, therefore, make it possible to communicate. We know that language, subject and society permeate Bakhtin's philosophy: the genres, as mentioned in the current text, are the "relatively stable" types of utterance (1986, p.60)

The genres are, therefore, a way to put the individual's voice in the center of the learning process: seeking, in life, the everyday practices of language production, which are common to the social individuals, and bringing those practices to school may renew the necessary motivation to language learning. It is necessary, as previously mentioned, that students, in school, read and produce texts, thus constructing meaning. We even believe that such proposals were already widely discussed and debated. However, they are always brought back to the classrooms and academic spheres because we still see practices of reading and writing, which are uninteresting and ineffective to teaching, perpetuating themselves.

In this context, Angela Kleiman (2000, 2007) brought an extremely relevant reflection on the relationship between literacy and school. The author focused on the native language teaching, but we understand that her proposal is highly linked to the different science learning processes, which use reading, writing and orality practices in the construction of knowledge.

The establishment of "literacy projects"

a set of activities originated from a real interest in the students' lives and whose accomplishment involves writing, that is, the reading of texts that, in fact, circulate in society and the production of texts that will actually be read in a collective work of students and teachers, each according to each one's ability. The literacy project is a social practice in which writing is used to achieve some other purpose, which goes beyond the mere learning of writing (learning the formal aspects only), turning circular objectives such as "writing in order to learn how to write" and "reading in order to learn how to read" into reading and writing in order to understand and learn what is relevant to the development and accomplishment of the project (KLEIMAN, 2000, p.238).

Considering the perspective advocated throughout the current paper, according to which school, language and life cannot be dissociated, we understand literacy projects as profitable situations linked to the socio-cultural and economic environment of the students. Such situations provide an authentic character to reading, writing and orality activities with a language practice proposal based on a set of texts ranging from the genres, which are typical of the student's everyday life, to the most requested genres in order to live in society with a citizen attitude. Permeating the social and dynamic character of the individuals' constitution through language and agreeing with the idea that "there can be no such thing as an abstract addressee" (VOLOŠINOV, 1973, p.85),

Towards this proposal, Guimarães and Kersch present a set of texts resulting from a long research process in which "didactic projects of genres (PDG - projetos didáticos de gêneros)" were built (2012, p.23). Those projects were a proposal for working with reading and textual production from the choice of a topic of interest to students, related to a social practice in a given period of time. The PDG "represents a co-construction of knowledge for a social practice that can be inserted in meaningful situations for learners and their teachers" (GUIMARÃES and KERSCH, 2012, p.36).

It is worth emphasizing that, once again, there is a growing concern with the inclusion of legitimate activities that increasingly intertwine language and subject. We reaffirm that, taken as something more than mere communication, language is constitutive of the individual - which is social – and, therefore, it is intrinsically related to the perspective of literacy in its broad sense, with social and political bias.

In order to have a school that enables subjects to become proficient readers and writers, it is necessary to create new forms of systematizing knowledge, with effective circulation of culture and science, in a way that language can be used in relevant contexts for the students' universe: this is not a proposal for a student to learn to read and write in order to adapt him/herself to society, but to understand language and deal with adverse situations in a more conscious way.

Final Remarks

Throughout the current paper, we sought to make a reflection on the relationship between Bakhtin's perspective of interaction through language and the possible consequences of taking it as a concept for the practices of reading and writing in school.

The considerations suggest, in fact, the need to think of the subject's knowledge and experience as central to the discursive production process in school, aiming at making school professionals recognize the important role they play in society. The need of the individual/student to recognize him/herself in the school language is pressing. When it does not happen, we accept a school that favors the student's passive attitude, does not build knowledge collectively and does not participate, responsively, in everyday actions. As a result, the students are not given means to confidently and freely move into the social interaction process.

The perspective adopted in the current study shows, as we see, that the essence of the relationship between language - as a discourse produced by a person within a context - and literacy bring consequences to the redefinition of reading and writing in the classroom. Showing and experiencing ways to interact with the world in various discursive situations, by producing and understanding utterances, must be one of our goals. Favoring a procedural work with language, rather than a normative teaching, is therefore our task.

REFERENCES

• BAKHTIN, M. Estética da criação verbal. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. 3.ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.
• _______ (VOLOCHINOV). Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem Problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. 12.ed. Trad. Michel Laud e Yara F. Vieira. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2006.
• BAKHTIN, M. M. Para uma filosofia do ato responsável Trad. aos cuidados de Valdemir Miotello & Carlos Alberto Faraco. São Carlos: Pedro e João Editores, 2010.
• DEWEY, J. Experience and Education Nova York: The Macmillan Company, 1947.
• FARACO, C. A. Linguagem & diálogo: as ideias linguísticas do Círculo de Bakhtin. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial, 2009.
• GERALDI, J. W. O texto na sala de aula: leitura e produção. 2.ed. Cascavel: Assoeste, 1984.
• _______. Portos de passagem São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1991.
• GUIMARÃES, A. M. M.; KERSCH, D. F. Caminhos da construção: projetos didáticos de gêneros na sala de aula de língua portuguesa. Campinas/São Paulo: Mercado de Letras, 2012.
• HEATH, S. What no bedtime story means: narrative skills at home and school. In: DURANTI, A. (Org.). Linguistic Anthropology: a Reader. Oxford: Blackwel, 2001.
• HERNÁNDEZ, F.; VENTURA, M. A organização do currículo por projetos de trabalho. Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas, 1998a.
• HERNÁNDEZ, F. Transgressão e mudança na educação: os projetos de trabalho. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 1998b.
• KLEIMAN, Â. Os significados do letramento Campinas: Mercado de Letras. 1995
• _______. O processo de aculturação pela escrita: ensino da forma ou aprendizagem da função? In: KLEIMAN, A.; SIGNORINI, I. (orgs.). O ensino e a formação do professor: alfabetização de jovens e adultos. Porto Alegre: Artmed, 2000.
• _______. Letramento e suas implicações para o ensino de língua materna. Revista Signo, Santa Cruz do Sul. v. 32 n. 53, p.1-25, dez, 2007.
• KLEIMAN, A.; CANICEROS, R. C.; TINOCO, G. Projetos de letramento no ensino médio. In: BUNZEN, C.; MENDONÇA, M. Múltiplas linguagens para o Ensino Médio São Paulo, Parábola, 2013.
• PONZIO, A. A concepção bakhtiniana do ato como dar um passo. In: BAKHTIN, M. M. Para uma filosofia do ato responsável Trad. aos cuidados de Valdemir Miotello & Carlos Alberto Faraco. São Carlos: Pedro e João Editores, 2010, p.9-38.
• ROJO, R. Letramentos múltiplos, escola e inclusão social. São Paulo: Parábola, 2009.
• SOARES, M. Letramento: um tema em três gêneros. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 1998.
• STREET, B. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• _______. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• _______. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London and New York: Longman, 1995.

¹

beyond the perspective of the reading and writing social uses, which has predominated in school practices and also in teacher training, embracing the commitments made by the individuals when engaging in these practices and the consequences of such involvement in their subjectification processes. The dialogue with elementary school teachers, participating in research and extension projects developed by the university, and with students from Language and Pedagogy undergraduate courses that get to the schools as trainees or scholarship holders for scientific initiation and

teaching initiation programs, has allowed us to scale the challenges faced by these individuals in mediating reading and writing situations with children and young people from different social classes. This dialogue instigates us to discuss the current approaches according to the concept of literacy, directly linking it to the idea of progress and evolution, by mitigating such perspective from a foray into the Bakhtinian philosophy of language.

²

These relatively stable types of oral or written utterances, which originate from the different fields of language use, aim at achieving communicative goals which are typical of such fields.

³

It is clear, therefore, that, according to Bakhtin, the utterance can only be understood, or addressed, in reference to the context in which it is originated. The vitality and the nature of the utterance as human production lies at the intersection between life and language; therefore, it is socially and historically contextualized. Understanding such interaction means understanding how, within the practices of language use, the individual is constituted as such and, at the same time, (re) creates language, according to his/her purpose and the position he/she occupies in the world as he/she experiences it. Hence the impossibility of addressing literacies restricted to the knowledge of the characteristics of genres and their communicative purposes as properties of the text, since such approach deprives language of its character of event. It is necessary to enter the field of language use in which the utterance and axiological frames are produced. The individuals act in the world from such frames and respond to it from such utterances. The most direct implication of this principle to school practices towards language is that these practices should take under consideration the practitioner individuals, their beliefs, expectations and experiences, otherwise language is presented to them as something that is imposed or overrides these experiences. This is a recurring theme in the philosophy of language developed by Bakhtin.

⁴

moving towards an approach on human existence in its concreteness regarding the establishment of a "

prima philosophia;" and the construction of a Marxist ideological creation theory, taking language as the central element of such theory.

⁵

⁶

In individual's actions and thoughts, he/she takes a position before the world in which his/her existence takes place as an act.

⁷

He/she responds to this world and, at the same time, takes responsibilities with such responses. In speech acts that take place in the school context, this response is present in many ways – in the type of text and work with the text proposed by the teacher, in the individuals' engagement or not in the proposed activities, in the expectations by teachers regarding students' performance, and in the meanings that students give to the texts they read or write, among other situations.

⁸

making us face the alterity theme, which is also a central element in Bakhtin Circle's reflections. Our acts are oriented in relation to the acts of the others, and their underlying values are defined from this contrast.

⁹

on the other hand, it is also an experience of confrontations, disputes, conflicts between perspectives, many times divergent, related to what reading and writing is and what being involved in such practices means to the individuals. This difference in perspective does not result in the impossibility of dialogue. On the contrary, it enhances the creation of the new, the unusual. It happens because the principle of alterity implies an extraposition movement of the sight in which

¹⁰

¹¹

language is a complex interaction phenomenon which carries the speaker's ideology. Thus, we cannot reduce it to pedagogical practices, to a system, since it has no objective existence. In this sense, we return to the idea that language exists because people produce it. By extension, we understand that language and life, as we have said, are inseparable.

¹²

In our contemporary urban societies, in which we are focused on writing within professional, cultural, scientific and artistic spheres, this concept has had great repercussion, especially for school, which has been characterized over the years as the main responsible for providing this technology to individuals.

¹³

¹⁴

and literacy, it is worth considering that although they have been used as synonyms by some authors,

¹⁵

¹⁶

since there are several ways to signify and represent reading and writing within society, in different social contexts.

¹⁷

In other words, all the school needed to do was to develop the reading and writing of its students so that they gradually enhance their skills, which would lead them to high and different stages of literacy, making them able to act in different social contexts of language use. On the other hand, the ideological model of literacy recognizes literacy practices related to social structures and the variety of cultural practices aggregated to reading and writing, i.e., the uses of writing are always associated with a cultural universe, ideology and power relations. It is clear then, that the role of writing, the individuals associated with it as well as its context of use are of paramount importance so that literacy practices have repercussions in the lives of the individuals/students. Treating writing as a matter of individual skill means adopting a simplistic and reductionist theoretical attitude for teaching: it means separating subject, language and life.

¹⁸

For us to be consistent, then, with a school that puts the individual as central element in the learning process, we need to think literacy in its multiple facets, in its social and cultural perspective. Therefore, we resorted to Bakhtin's perspective so that the current school can conceive of language as interaction, which would mean a change of attitude since we think that its active interlocutors, in a joint construction of meanings, situated in a particular discursive context, are still a challenge to the current teaching.

¹⁹

Such proposal, which relates to Bakhtin's philosophical perspective of language, brings up the language, its social use, the individuals who interact with it and the ways through which it becomes concrete: the speech genres.

²⁰

because they are historically constructed, produced and (re)used by members of the different communication fields related to the spheres of human activities, i.e., they are a collective construction.

²¹

(KLEIMAN, 2007) would be ways to find places to experience several literate social practices in order to assume literacies as the school work structuring objective within all cycles. A literacy project, according to the author, is

²²

²³

if we do not take into account the speech situations, to whom will the students and teachers say what they want and need to say?

²⁴

The authors emphasize that the activities should always be linked to a conception of language as interaction, with a specific purpose. The results show a less artificial practice in school that, in our view, is justified by the meaning given to the reading and writing activities, in which the individual can say something to someone with a certain purpose. Reading and writing gain meaning.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 Dec 2014
• Date of issue
  Dec 2014

History

• Accepted
  24 Sept 2014
• Received
  28 Apr 2014